The shortcut for academic referencing startup RefME has secured a $5m seed round from education service provider GEMS.
The Tech City-based edtech company was founded last year by 24-year-old entrepreneur Tom Hatton and has received an average of around 10,000 downloads each day during the last 12 months.
The free app and web platform enables users to scan a book’s barcode or input various bits of data, even as little as a website address, to quickly create academic references in more than 6,500 different international styles.
The tool syncs with Microsoft Office and platforms like Evernote so no one need ever be working through the night the day before essay hand in to get their citations up to scratch.
Although the company is yet to make any money, the team, which includes former Morgan Stanley, Google and Apple employees, as well as an ex-Nasa data scientist, is hoping to use the data generated to create additional tools. This will include recommended research based on the books you’ve cited, optical character recognition for scanning documents, and PDF annotation.